


both your hands (closed on my chest, like a pair of wings)

by zauberer_sirin



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Bisexual Daisy Johnson, Coulson being supportive, Developing Relationship, F/M, First Kiss, Future Fic, Introspection, POV Phil Coulson, Post-Coital, Reference to Child Abuse, Romance, tiny mentions of Coulson/others
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-10
Updated: 2016-10-10
Packaged: 2018-08-21 17:47:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8254819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: Coulson thinks about Daisy's hands.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [BrilliantlyHorrid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BrilliantlyHorrid/gifts).



> Title from Pablo Neruda.

**1.**

He recognizes her hands.

Her hands pulling him from the fire, from the darkness. Not for the first time. There was another time where her voice pierced a similar darkness. Her hands on his chest then, they seemed small and delicate as they held his. Now they are strong as she carries him out of the burning building. The smoke doesn’t let him see, just the frame of her, her arm raised as she vibrates the doors off their hinges, as her powers part the veil of fire before them like a biblical gesture. Coulson doesn’t believe in that stuff - God, the Bible, it has never been his thing.

Thanks to Daisy he believes in miracles.

He chokes when he tries to draw a breath. Outside, she lies him on the cold ground, in the middle of the street. The acrid sting of the smoke makes his eyes water, but he wants to open them, he wants to see her. For so many months the only way to see her was through security camera feeds.

Her hands on his chest again, Daisy is calling him.

 _Coulson, Coulson_. And he’s come to think of that as his true name, more than Phil. Other than May the people who would usually call him Phil are people he hasn’t seen in years, or people he will never see again.

She goes away. She apologizes, he thinks.

“Everything will be fine,” she promises him. Meaning he will be fin. 

He thinks she kisses his forehead before she leaves, but maybe the smoke is making him see things that are not there.

Later, Mack’s familiar voice.

Later, Simmons telling him “you were lucky”, a couple more minutes and the smoke would have injured his lungs irremediably. Coulson wants to argue. _Lucky_? No such thing. Daisy. She saved him. Saying he was lucky feels like a betrayal - like he is taking the credit from her. When so many things have already been taken from her.

Simmons also tells him technology has advanced a lot these days, and she will be able to take care of his burns. “It won’t even leave a scar,” she says in that comfortingly inappropriate tone of hers.

Daisy’s mother had scars; but he never saw them while she was alive, he never saw her but as a corpse. They weren’t burns, though. John Garrett had burns. He changed after getting them - in ways Coulson had tragically underestimated and still feels guilty about it. He is relieved to hear he won’t scar from the burns. Does it make him shallow, superficial, that he cares about that stuff? That he finds the scar he already has on his chest disgusting? That he couldn’t bear to take his t-shirt off the one time he has taken a lover in four years? Yes, it probably makes him a shallow person. Daisy didn’t scar after Quinn shot him, one of the least disturbing side effects of the GH drug. He remembers not being able to see it as a good thing at the moment -a young woman, she probably would be happy about not having a patch of scarred skin over her stomach, Coulson should have been happy for her- because he was so goddamn terrified of what that magical feat of healing could mean.

But no scars means there is no trace of the encounter on his body - the bruises will fade, and the burning in his throat from the smoke will cease and he’ll have no way of proving Daisy was there, that he saw her, they met. If he’s never to see her again he’d rather keep the scars.

 

**2.**

Next time he presses his own hand against the glass. He’s done this before too, when it turned out -and he didn’t know, or didn’t want to know- that there was more than a glass wall separating them, there was the matter of her becoming a completely different species. But now the difference is that Daisy lifts her hands to the glass as well; not exactly over the place Coulson has put his, not exactly like in a movie, but close enough.

“You could break out of here at any time,” he says, and Daisy smiles knowingly, unable to deny it. “You helped design these cells, after all.”

She nods. “I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble with the new Director.”

“You need to stop thinking about others,” Coulson tells her, knowing well that’s not something Daisy would ever do. He wonders if she even understands such language.

 

**3.**

Her arms are almost fully healed now, the light blue traces of past fractures only visible under certain lights. She takes a bit longer to heal these days, the Inhuman metabolism slightly worn down by pushing herself too hard, for too long.

Coulson remembers the first time he saw those bruises on her arms. The moment his hometown stopped being his hometown, and his father’s school stopped being his father’s school - it became the place where Daisy passed out and fell, the place where he only barely caught her before she reached the ground. He carried her to the Bus in his arms and stayed by her side all the way back to base, sat at the edge of her bunk, watched as Simmons figured out what had happened (the terrible language of inward shaking, broken bones, the shock too painful to keep conscious, making his stomach turn) but he left her just before she woke up - Coulson has always regretted that last part.

He measures the few days she has been back with the team by the fading of her bruises. She sees him looking and insists they don’t even hurt that much. She refuses painkillers, to his alarm.

“I can tell what you’re thinking,” she says. “It’s not self-flagellation or anything like that.”

She explains it to Coulson in scientific, Simmons-like terms. The response of her brain to Hive’s control and the response of her brain to painkillers are very similar, the chemistry different mostly in its strength. Daisy has had to resort painkillers anyway at times after she left SHIELD, but they gave her disturbing flashbacks, because her body remembered. 

“Brains are weird, uh?” she finishes with a half-convincing smile. 

Of course this being Daisy she hasn’t asked the science lab for an alternative, easy as that might be.

“I’ve only just come back,” she replies. “I didn’t want to…”

Be a bother, Coulson fills in the gaps.

He asks and Simmons’ team come up with something in half an hour, a cooling gel that acts directly on the skin to relieve the pain, but chemically has nothing in common with painkillers.

“Thanks, you didn’t have to…”

Go through all the trouble? Coulson fills in the gaps.

He watches her apply the gel carefully over her knuckles and wrists, her arm almost until the elbow, before putting on her gauntlets, as they fly to a mission on the Zephyr 1. He wonders if he should have offered to do it for her, but was afraid of being intrusive.

 

**4.**

Her hands don’t tremble when she signs the document. 

Why should they? Daisy does everything with conviction. Even signing a contract that allows SHIELD to make her a second class citizen.

“Are you okay?” he asks afterwards.

She takes a moment to reply, as if his voice has shaken her, but she only realizes with delay. It takes her a moment to fix her usual “don’t worry about me” smile.

“Does this mean you’re my superior again?” she jokes, a bit forced. “Pity, I had gotten used to you being just plain agent, like me.”

The conundrum: this piece of paper that allows her to go back to being a SHIELD agent is the same that makes him professionally responsible for her again. More than that, legally responsible.

Her fingers around a cold bottle of beer. Not a celebratory drink, exactly. Coulson knows how she feels about the Sokovia Accords. He feels the same, but you can’t compare it. He wouldn’t have to go to jail for what he feels about the legislation.

“This is the only way,” she says, nodding to herself, Coulson a companionable spectator she could easily forget about if she needed.

The only way. He wonders. Those weeks going on missions when she still wasn’t “official” part of SHIELD feel defiant in retrospect. Coulson thinks he preferred it like that. Daisy lingers in the kitchen, asking him to keep her company without words. She doesn’t like spending too much time alone these days.

 

**5.**

She grabs his shoulder as she walks away to face terrible and unfair danger, just because she is both instrumental and expendable to new SHIELD. Her fingers squeeze his shoulder when he looks at her, unconvinced. She has done this before. Her fingers linger a bit more this time. So much that Coulson can reach with his own hand and cover hers with it.

“Everything will be fine,” she tells him, like an echo. “If it’s goes south, you’ve got me.”

After all those months spent without any backup, knowing she was out on her own, the words sound to him like a tenuous but important gesture of trust. But Coulson can’t make a promise he has broken so many times. He squeezes her hand, which is hardly the same.

He’s sure she kissed his forehead when she dragged him out of that burning building, weeks ago. He’s sure he did something like that once. To someone he once loved.

Maybe he imagined her kiss after all.

 

**6.**

She has a mole on her hand.

He had noticed before, but he has never _noticed_ before. It’s early and they have spent the night in a safehouse, after a close call during a trip to a no-go zone for Inhumans. Daisy is pouring boiling water on the instant coffee, and he is massaging his neck (he took the couch, like a gentleman, or maybe he was too tired to go any further than the living room). Her hands over the kitchen counter, in this too-early light, almost blue. He has seen the mole on her hand before, but this is the first time he notices it.

She catches him looking.

“This? I used to hate this,” she says, lifting her hand as if wanting to see it better herself. “ _Now_ it looks tiny but. It was a lot bigger when I was a kid, and when I was a kid… well, you know how other kids are.”

He stares at her. Looking nervous, Daisy talks on.

“It was bad enough that I was the girl known for having been kicked out of her foster home a record of nine times. I didn’t want to be the girl with the monster mole on her hand, too. So I took a liking to long sleeves and fingerless gloves.”

She stills likes long sleeves, Coulson notes, suddenly breathless, his heart pounding for some strange reason, like he has something stuck in his throat, like it’s been stuck there for years. He kisses Daisy for the first time here, after hearing about cruel kids and her monster mole.

 

**7.**

She has old woman’s hands. Looking at them you would never know how young she is. Coulson makes himself promise to always remember how young she is, and never make excuses. He knows how it looks - even if Daisy has old lady hands (they make him smile) he knows how it looks when her hand is resting over his chest like this, careful not to touch his scar, her fingers playing with hair that already has more gray than black in it.

“Are you looking for more moles?” she asks, noticing Coulson’s fixation on her hands.

“No, I just… I like your hands a lot.”

He’s not really lying, and he can’t tell her what he was thinking - he promises himself Daisy deserves nothing less than affection without any reservations. His issues are his own.

“My hands? I thought you liked my legs,” she teases, throwing one leg over his thigh. Coulson groans as her skin brushes his still too sensitive cock and he grabs her knee and keeps it in place.

“I really like your legs,” he says, tapping his fingers, desire creeping even if it’s only been a few minutes.

Daisy turns over, climbing on top of him and straddling him with her thighs. She grabs both his hands and pushes them against the mattress, pinning him. She holds him tight, like last night, the first time, as if making sure he is not going to escape. She holds his prosthetic hand even tighter, so he can feel it just as much as the other, giving his body a balance and a whole-ness Coulson hasn’t felt since he lost his hand.

She drops her head until their faces are very close, until he can feel her morning breath on him and she can smell herself on his breath. Her words move very slowly now.

“I thought you liked my eyes.”

She is corny, and perhaps other people might think her needy. He’s glad she’s needy. He’s glad he can not only say all these things to her, but that Daisy actually asks him to.

“I like your eyes very much.”

Daisy smiles, brushing the corner of that smile against his lips.

“I thought it was my voice,” she says.

Coulson closes his eyes. There’s no being afraid of the dark as long as he can feel Daisy near, as long as he can hear her.

“I love your voice best of all,” he confesses in a sigh.

When he opens his eyes she is fake-pouting at him.

“And here I thought it was my ass that did the trick,” she jokes.

He frees his hands and loops them behind her, cupping her ass in his palms.

“You have a great ass,” he says.

They both laugh, Daisy collapsing against his mouth, reaching her hands to his hair, grabbing, never letting go.

 

**8.**

He slips the ring on her finger. No, not an engagement ring or anything like that (he doesn’t even dream of that, not right now), just a little silvery cheap thing he knows Daisy will like. She has been wearing the same ring since he met her; a memory from her first love, she’s told Coulson, a girl she went to high school with, the first person Daisy ever loved and had wanted to have sex with, after her experiences in foster care had numbed her to these feelings (Coulson remembers she held his hand tight when she told him all this). The ring meant they were forever, as all foolish young girls believe. Her name was Mira. She was a skater, of course.

“Mira. What’s what short for?” he asked.

“Ramira,” Daisy said then, smiling fondly. “Let’s put it this way: Mack and you are not the only ones who learned some Spanish to impress a girl.”

“That’s not fair,” Coulson replied. “My situation was different. It was work.”

“You forget _I saw_ the girl in question. That wasn’t work.”

Now she takes the ring he’s given her, slips it off her finger and puts it on another, next to the ring her first love gave her. Coulson is happy to be in that company, not as an usurper, but as a continuation. He wants to be part of a long line of happy loves for Daisy, and he doesn’t need to be the first or the last, as long as she is able to remember him like she remembers this other girl, as long as memories of him will someday still make her smile.

“Where did you buy it?” Daisy asks with genuine curiosity.

“There was a shop next to the grocery store.”

“So that’s what you were doing when you were taking so long to buy milk yesterday?”

He nods, shyly. He doesn’t know how to live life on holiday, and he doesn’t know how to live the gift of spending so much time with Daisy, every gesture he makes is a new one, and he’s never sure it’s the right one.

“Thanks, I love it,” Daisy says, looking at the ring, kissing Coulson, like she can tell what he is thinking. “Come on, let’s go for a walk.”

She wraps one arm around Coulson’s waist, the other hand holding his as he slips his arm, without thinking, around Daisy’s shoulder.

He has never done this before.


End file.
